The Unspoken Reason for Lockdowns

Governments cannot openly admit that the "controlled easing” of COVID-19 lockdowns in fact means controlled progress toward so-called herd immunity to the virus. Much better, then, to pursue this objective silently, under a cloud of obfuscation, and hope that a vaccine will arrive before most of the population gets infected.

LONDON – The COVID-19 pandemic is the first major global crisis in human history to be treated as a mathematical problem, with governments regarding policy as the solution to a set of differential equations. Excluding a few outliers – including, of course, US President Donald Trump – most political leaders have slavishly deferred to “the science” in tackling the virus. The clearest example of this was the UK government’s sudden shift on March 23 to an aggressive lockdown policy, following a nightmarish forecast by Imperial College London researchers of up to 550,000 deaths if nothing was done to combat the pandemic.

Such modeling is the correct scientific approach when the question debars experiment. You can test a new drug by subjecting two groups of lab rats to identical conditions, except for the drug they are given, or by administering it to randomly selected humans in clinical trials.

But you can’t deliberately insert a virus into a human population to test its effects, although some Nazi concentration-camp doctors did just that. Instead, scientists use their knowledge of the infectious pathogen to model a disease’s pattern of contagion, and then work out which policy interventions will modify it.

Predictive modeling was first developed for malaria over a century ago by an almost-forgotten English doctor, Ronald Ross. In a fascinating 2020 book, the mathematician and epidemiologist Adam Kucharski showed how Ross first identified the mosquito as the infectious agent through experiments on birds. From this fact, he developed a predictive model of malaria transmission, which was later generalized as the SIR (Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered) model of contagious-disease epidemics.

The question that interested epidemiologists was not what triggers an epidemic, but what causes it to end. They concluded that epidemics end naturally when enough people have had the disease so that further transmission rates decline. Basically, the virus runs out of hosts in which it can reproduce itself. In today’s jargon, the population develops “herd immunity.”

The science developed from Ross’s original model is almost universally accepted, and has been fruitfully applied in other contexts, like financial contagion. But no policymaker is prepared to allow a killer epidemic to run its natural course, because the potential death toll would be unacceptable.

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After all, the 1918-19 Spanish flu killed some 50-100 million people out of a global population of two billion: a death rate between 2.5% and 5%. No one knew for sure what the COVID-19 death rate would have been had the spread of the coronavirus been uncontrolled.

Because there is currently no COVID-19 vaccine, governments have had to find other ways to prevent “excess deaths.” Most have opted for lockdowns, which remove entire populations from the path of the virus and thus deprive it of hosts.

Two months into the European lockdown, however, the evidence suggests that these measures on their own have not had much medical effect. For example, Sweden, with its exceptionally light lockdown, has had fewer COVID-19 deaths relative to its population than tightly locked-down Italy and Spain. And while the United Kingdom and Germany have both been aggressively locked down, Germany has so far reported 96 deaths per million inhabitants, compared to 520 per million in the UK.

The crucial difference between Germany and the UK seems to lie in their respective medical responses. Germany started mass testing, contact-tracing, and isolating the infected and exposed within a few days of confirming its first COVID-19 cases, thus giving itself a head start in slowing the virus’s spread.

The UK, by contrast, is hobbled by incoherence at the center of government and by what former foreign secretary David Owen (himself a medical doctor) has called the “structural vandalism” inflicted on the National Health Service by years of cuts, fragmentation, and centralization. As a result, the country lacked the medical tools for a German-style response.

Science cannot determine what the correct COVID-19 response should have been for each country. A model may be considered validated if its predictions correspond to outcomes in real life. But in epidemiology, we can have confidence that this will happen only if a virus with known properties is allowed to run its natural course in a given population, or if there is a single intervention like a vaccine, the results of which can be accurately predicted.

Too many variables – including, say, medical capacity or cultural characteristics – scrambles the model, and it starts spewing out scenarios and predictions like a demented robot. Today, epidemiologists cannot tell us what the effects of the current COVID-19 policy mix will be. “We will know only in a year or so,” they say.

The outcome will therefore depend on politics. And the politics of COVID-19 are clear enough: governments could not risk the natural spread of infection, and thought it too complicated or politically fraught to try to isolate only those most at risk of severe illness or death, namely the 15-20% of the population aged over 65.

The default policy response has been to slow the spread of natural immunity until a vaccine can be developed. What “flattening the curve” really means is spacing out the number of expected deaths over a period long enough for medical facilities to cope and a vaccine to kick in.

But this strategy has a terrible weakness: governments cannot keep their populations locked down until a vaccine arrives. Apart from anything else, the economic cost would be unthinkable. So, they have to ease the lockdown gradually.

Doing this, however, lifts the cap on non-exposure gained from the lockdown. That is why no government has an explicit exit strategy: what political leaders call the “controlled easing” of lockdowns actually means controlled progress toward herd immunity.

Governments cannot openly avow this, because that would amount to admitting that herd immunity is the objective. And it is not yet even known whether and for how long infection confers immunity. Much better, then, to pursue this goal silently, under a cloud of obfuscation, and hope that a vaccine arrives before most of the population is infected.

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Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

This unfortunately overlooks a third policy that has proven highly successful in many countries (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand): containment using contact tracing, testing and isolation. Taiwan has had a total of 7 deaths, compared to 5000 in comparably sized the Netherlands, although it was affected earlier and is closer to China. And that without a lockdown.See https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6492/742https://www.brookings.edu/testing-responses-through-agent-based-computational-epidemiology-trace/https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936.full

Lockdown is only useful if it is imposed early enough or draconially enough to drive new cases to a level low enough to permit contact tracing. There is no way to reach herd immunity, should it even be possible without a vaccine, without millions of deaths, overloading the healthcare system, and destroying the economy.

Correct. But there is not just a technical side but also a political one.In Kerala with 36 million inhabitants there are four deaths due to this virus. See this piece from New York Times: https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=30&emc=edit_int_20200522&instance_id=18705&nl=the-interpreter&productCode=INT&regi_id=51887550&segment_id=28865&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F7e008844-58bb-46e2-806f-a29e24e6bf86&user_id=b1118585044c9994f5619c3dfc9d5eb4 As described Kerala has a political and administrative system working for the the people of the state, democracy, while the US system only works for the party that won the election, in my language no more than the shadow of democracy.

Sweden's Corvid virus fatality rate as measured against a total population base of approximately10 million appears to be less than .004%, and they have managed to continue with a reasonable level of social, commercial and economic activity. This certainly raise the issue of countries and the global society focusing on establishing prudent and robust national health care systems with a basis in pragmatic science. Data from the UK and the US, where healthcare systems are underfunded and less trusted indicate that their populations are at risk, and that their economic and social costs may end up being significantly higher than Sweden's. Perhaps even conservative politicians globally, as well as in the US and the UK, will realize that we all will be healthier and safer with a global assurance of a well-funded and trusted public health care system. Viral and bacterial threats will continue to emerge, adapt and change as commerce, tourism and shipping constantly transmit them across national boundaries and oceans, and the lock-down model does not appear to be successful by any measure. Along with Sweden's courageous approach, perhaps it is also timely that healthcare systems and individuals begin analyzing and questioning how life styles, nutrition and urban densities appear to be contributing to a generally declining level of robust population and individual immunity. Much cutting edge research in the last 20 years has implicated the practice of relying on antibiotics, factory produced fast foods as well as the long-term impacts of human beings increasingly living in very dense urban environments.

I note with interest that the author maintains throughout the presumption that lockdown has markedly reduced ease of transmission. It’s not an unreasonable thing to accept. It meets the common sense of it. But I believe the evidence is overwhelming that - as practiced in western countries - lockdown has almost no effect on viral spreading. Exhibit 1 is Sweden. It’s timecourse is a curve which nests with most others which had aggressive lockdown, like Italy. If lockdown didn’t bring the pandemic to an end in Sweden, what did? Also, in every US state in which it’s been studied, the rate of transmission has not altered as lockdown was applied then lifted. In locked down countries, new infections occurred at high pace, sufficient to drive daily deaths of several hundreds per day. In fact, I can’t name a place where lockdown alone appears to have done anything. Where it’s been applied AND control of the virus is claimed, there have always been multiple, other controls such as test, track & isolate in Germany. I have a very important corollary. If as I contend lockdown is pure theatre but ineffective, something else is terminating the pandemic everywhere. Mr Occam would suggest emerging herd immunity. We will know very soon. In support if this hypothesis, Denmark is now week 5 or 6 since reopening primary schools, but there hasn’t been a spike. Also lined up with HI as terminator is some simple arithmetic. Numerous estimates exist for infection fatality ratio. The mode of these studies is around 0.1-0.2%. That means for every 2000 deaths, 1 million people have been infected (it could be twice as many). So 34,000 deaths in U.K. imply 17 million infections. Whether the survivors are completely immune or not probably doesn’t matter, it will be enough to act as a brake. Add to this a German observation that a third of their population carried some level of immunity due to prior exposure to related viruses & I contend we’re already all but at herd immunity.If that’s true, we’ll get no second spike, possibly a few small clusters only. A bit like Denmark, in fact.Nb: I would have agreed to lockdown had I been in charge. I wouldn’t have extended it, twice, and mucked about for weeks to months thereafter.

"Spanish flu"? It had no validity as a Spaniard. Please correct this error, which discriminates against us and points us as guilty when the actions of the Spanish authorities were exemplary, unlike that of the allies of the war, who hid the data.

*globally the politicos have made a huge panic driven mistake by the kneejerk of the lockdowns. As anyone who has ever instinctively swerved the wheel in the opposite direction when skidding on black ice will know, sometimes what your instincts are screaming at you to do, is the wrong thing to do. And in the long run this generation of politicos will not be thanked for what they have done. Instead they will be reviled. Not very fair of course, because populations globally wanted this, but that will quickly be forgotten when large scale destitution is a reality. There were no good choices to make here, only the horrible task of picking the least worst long term option, with unremitting criticism a given, no matter what you did. By ducking unpopularity now and instead embracing the snake oil of the lockdowns, by not having the guts to present their populations with unpalatable choices, they have guaranteed a now unavoidable global depression, which will cost way more lives than they will ever save. With the additional cost of a smashed global economy to boot. Was it worth it?

Per the CDC the average effectiveness of flu vaccines for the last 5 years was 34.8%. Remember, this is for the strains they selected to create vaccines for. It was 0% for any other strains. So we might be kidding ourselves if we think a vaccine is a panacea. It could stop one strain of Covid-19 while the other seven (so far) continue their rampage unperturbed. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates.html

"Remember, this is for the strains they selected to create vaccines for. It was 0% for any other strains."

Not true. This figure is with respect to ALL the strains.

From CDC:

"What factors can affect the results of influenza vaccine efficacy and effectiveness studies?

The protective benefits of influenza vaccination are generally lower during flu seasons where the majority of circulating influenza viruses differ from the influenza viruses used to make the vaccines. Influenza viruses are continuously changing through a natural process known as antigenic drift. (For more information, see How the flu virus can change: Drift and Shift.) However, the degree of antigenic drift and the frequency of drifted viruses in circulation can vary for each of the three or four viruses included in the seasonal flu vaccine. So even when circulating influenza viruses are mildly or moderately drifted in comparison to the vaccine, it is possible that people may still receive some protective benefit from vaccination; and if other circulating influenza viruses are well matched, the vaccine could still provide protective benefits overall."

In other words, there was a 66% probability that you'd contact a strain which was NOT included in the vaccine.

But as far as i am concerned, scientists are yet to discover information about immunity from this virus. So no one knows yet how long will this immunity last. And if,for example we take that the immunity lasts for a year, that means we might have annual attacks/waves of corona virus again and again and again until a vaccine comes to play . So herd immunity also doesn’t show much hope.

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Mass protests over racial injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a sharp economic downturn have plunged the United States into its deepest crisis in decades. Will the public embrace radical, systemic reforms, or will the specter of civil disorder provoke a conservative backlash?

For democratic countries like the United States, the COVID-19 crisis has opened up four possible political and socioeconomic trajectories. But only one path forward leads to a destination that most people would want to reach.

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